Feeling a bit mystified about social media marketing? Wondering how and when to target whom with what, and where? Relax. Let’s take a calm stroll through the social media whirl and map out a clear path – avoiding the pitfalls and identifying the best routes to success.
Why?
A common mistake when advertising on social media is not knowing what your goals are. Don’t start spending money on ads without knowing what results you want back from them. Are you trying to generate sales? Are you promoting a service? Do you want to build relationships with customers? Your answers to these questions will help you decide which social media avenues and activities to pursue and – later on – will help you measure and track your success.
Who?
Before you decide what to say and where to say it, you need to pin down who your audience is. Even a great marketing campaign can fail if you don’t understand who you’re pitching it to.
When you’re just starting out, carefully consider these questions: what problem is your business trying to solve? How will it do this? What’s your USP? When you have the answers, you can look into the demographics that coincide with them.
If you’re further along on your business journey, you’ll already know your demographic as you’ll have built up an audience. Use your existing customer data to attract more people based on those who have already purchased (they’ll be high value and more likely to buy from you).
Build up your customers’ personas as much as possible (i.e. clearly picture one person who encapsulates the personality and qualities of your core demographic). This is important for precision targeting. However, don’t make the mistake of narrowing down your audience too much with specific age/gender/interests/location filters.
Keep communicating with your customers. Ask them what they like and where they hang out, etc. Every time you talk to your customers, take the opportunity to get to know them better, by:
- Listening to any feedback they give you via your customer support channels.
- Carrying out surveys with specific targeted questions or product/market fit (PMF) surveys.
- Having one-to-one conversations with specific groups of people – asking them directly about their experience with your product, service, app or website.
What?
Having pinned down who you’re talking to, you’ll have a good steer on what content to create. Your content should always convey your message in a way that works for your audience. Think about where and how people are using your content. Design it to suit their needs and habits.
Make sure what you write is relatable and something you’d say yourself organically. It should be friendly and approachable, not patronising. If you can, use positive quotations from other customers to endorse your message.
Use your blog content to help warm up your audience for the main event, such as explaining how you got the big idea for your product – or the manufacturing and development process behind it.
Where?
Now you’ve identified your ‘why’, ‘who’ and ‘what’, this will naturally feed into where best to place your message. You can have an impact with any social media platform – here are some pros and cons to help you choose:
- Facebook: (including Messenger, Marketplace, etc.) – businesses have a lot of success advertising products on this platform.
- Google: can be harder to set up but can also be successful – try to use it in tandem with Facebook.
- Twitter: used to be an effective advertising platform but people have moved away from it, so businesses haven’t been seeing the best results there.
- LinkedIn: has a high Cost Per Reach. It’s effective for specific services, such as advertising events and recruiting – but doesn’t have the same reach as other apps.
- TikTok: fast-growing, good for building brand awareness, but not as wide a demographic as other platforms.
- Snapchat: again, good for building brand awareness, but not as wide a demographic as other platforms.
- App Store search: this can be used to tap into the people who are already searching for similar products and are ready to download/purchase. You can increase your success with good hyper-targeting.
How?
To get the most value (and learning) from your social media advertising you need to track its performance and assess how it’s doing. Here are a few ways to measure your success:
- Facebook Analytics is a good way to track people’s engagement with your adverts and content – including what they’re clicking on and sharing, so you can review what’s working and what’s not.
- Mobile measurement platforms enable you to assess campaign performance on mobile apps. You can sync them with Facebook, Snapchat, etc. to help map out your user journeys and analyse how people are interacting with your ads. You can also monitor how specific ads and campaigns are performing in the long run – what’s their lifetime value?
- Websites let you collect user data with tools such as Google Analytics, Google Conversion Tags etc.
When?
There’s no magic formula about when to advertise – but you can sometimes get better results at the weekend (because people are on their phones more and may have more time to engage with your content). The platform’s algorithm should be able to work out the best time to post your advertisements to boost their performance.
Our main advice in answer to ‘when’ to advertise is: NOW! Nothing’s more deadly to your brand than invisibility – so what’s to lose by putting yourself out there? Have fun with it – and do message us (on social media of course) to let us know how you get on.
This How-to guide was inspired by one of our Zoom Dives with growth marketing expert, Hannah Parvaz, Head of Growth at Curio. Look out for our related article ‘How to squeeze every penny out of your paid social advertising’ – coming soon.
A Zoom Dive is a deep-delving discussion between our founder, Carolyn Dailey and a handpicked business expert from the creative world. Fancy catching our next Zoom Dive, live? See our Events calendar and sign up for free.
Want to learn more about social media marketing? Feel free to plunder our Knowledge bank.